Luke Tryl

Luke Tryl is Senior Education Officer at Stonewall and a Conservative Party activist in Lambeth.

It’s now increasingly accepted that though this Government’s raison d’etre lies in tackling the economic crisis, its educational reforms will be its lasting legacy. Even Michael Gove’s opponents admit that from the way schools are governed, to what they teach and who teaches, the Education Secretary is pressing forward with reformist zeal, the like of which we have not witnessed since Butler.

With action being taken on so many fronts to transform our schools, we all might be forgiven for overlooking the sixth bullet of Section 26 of the Coalition Agreement. This announced the Government’s commitment to support schools to combat homophobic bullying. This commitment has the potential to have just as transformative an impact as many of the Government’s headline school reforms.

Importantly, the pledge was not simply a sop to the party’s Liberal Democrat coalition partners; anyone who saw Nick Gibb address Stonewall’s education conference last year, or heard his response to a Parliamentary debate on homophobic bullying last month will be in no doubt that this a key priority for both sides of the Coalition. Nor is it a commitment limited to a metropolitan Notting Hill set, for which there is no greater testament than the fact that last year it was the rural-Conservative led Cambridgeshire Council that topped Stonewall’s Education Equality Index for its work to combat homophobic bullying.

Indeed, it is a fitting tribute to the success of the modernisation project that the Conservative Party, which even up until the early 2000s was rallying for the retention of Section 28, which actively hampered schools’ ability to combat homophobic bullying, is now leading a Government which places such a premium on tackling this very same bullying.

Luke Tryl works for a communications consultancy, is a former President of the Oxford Union, and a Conservative activist in Lambeth.

I knew that I’d reached the wrong side of what could charitably be described as “youth” when at Conference I caught myself lamenting to a friend about how to “re-engage young people in the democratic process” in the wake of the riots. They were words I’d have balked at just a couple of years ago, but I’m not alone in thinking this, nor were the riots the first time the issue has been raised - “how we get young people interested in politics” has been a question dominating political discourse since Pitt the Younger hit 30.

Nowhere is there more handwringing over the question than in the Conservative Party, where some still find it difficult to understand why young people are now more likely to find their future partners on mysinglefriend.com rather than in the local Conservative club. Those discussing the “youth” problem” tend to split into one of two camps: those that propose a variety of increasingly wacky, hip, and ultimately futile schemes to get young people interested in politics, and those resigned to writing young people off as some kind of feral underclass; more interested in smashing up Clapham High Street than signing up to “Better Off Out”.

I still remember attending my first party conference back in 2003. Iain Duncan Smith had just imposed a three line whip against gay adoption and in a 15 year-old’s mix of trepidation and precociousness I challenged the party chairman on the policy.

Seven years later and things have certainly changed with Conservatives not only marching front and centre at London Pride, but being cheered as they did so. It’s a Conservative-led administration which has proposed the first ever lesbian, gay and bisexual agenda for government, a government with gay Ministers for policing, international development and energy, numerous entries in the Independent on Sunday’s “Pink List” and perhaps just as significant, more openly-gay MPs than any other party. Perhaps shrill attacks on “homophobic Tories” will no longer longer wash?

The Tory “Christian right” are clearly not entirely comfortable with this embrace, worrying both that the gay rights movement is merely a vehicle of the left and that in order for gay people to be given equality they might lose their rights of belief and expression.

Recent ConservativeHome pieces such as Melancthon’s ‘On not being homophobic’ typify this attitude by suggesting that the Christian majority is somehow now being persecuted for its beliefs by a vociferous gay rights lobby. He is, however, simply mistaken. I consider myself part of the “gay rights movement”. I care very little whether Melanchthon thinks being a practising homosexual is immoral or not but I certainly defend his right to think and say it, even if from behind his coy veil of anonymity.

Dale Bassett and Luke Tryl are the senior researcher and researcher at Reform, specialising in education. They are co-authors, along with Andrew Haldenby, of Core Business, which is published today.

"The very best means of helping all realise their potential – of making opportunity more equal – is guaranteeing the best possible education for as many as possible.”

So said Michael Gove to the RSA in June, and few would argue with him. But what is the best possible education?

The last 25 years have witnessed successive governments give the same answer: taking a growing number of children out of academic study altogether. Since the introduction of the GCSE and NVQ (by a Conservative Government), the development of the British education system has been based on the assumption that an academic education should be the preserve of the few. Policymakers have determined that from the age of 14 students should be separated into those who can and those who can’t.

This “capability myth” has seeped into every aspect of education policy. Successive governments have introduced vocational qualifications for 14-16 year olds which are both “equivalent” and share a “parity of esteem” with academic qualifications. The result has been a resounding failure, with qualification after qualification being introduced only to be withdrawn after employers and students realise that they are in no way a substitute for academic study. This inconvenient truth has not prevented Ministers from weighting the system in favour of vocational qualifications, quantifying their value above that of GCSEs in school league tables.

This Government has continued the con trick played on generations of students pushed into vocational routes. The Diploma, which conflates academic and vocational learning, has further exacerbated the problem by delivering neither effectively and undermining rigorous academic study.